Total War: Rome 2 beta patch 4 gets an update

10 Oct 2013 by Peter Parrish

The patch doesn’t add Brian Blessed. Sorry to get your hopes up.

Beta patch 4 for Total War: Rome 2 is still, well, in beta. Today, it got a new update adding a variety of fixes for things still afflicting the Creative Assembly strategy title. If you’re someone who is opted-in to the beta patch, Steam should download the update automatically. If you want to opt-in, the navigate your way to Rome 2 on your Steam games list, right-click for ‘properties’ then find the betas tab and select beta patch 4 in the drop-down menu.

The developers will be rolling this patch out as official when it’s in a satisfactory and stable state, so bear in mind that if you choose to be in the beta you may experience some weirdness until it’s all sorted out. Here’s what’s in the latest Rome 2 update:

- Fix rare crash when AI initiated diplomacy with the player. – Fixed problem with slinger units being overpowered as their shots could hit multiple units and made balancing adjustments to other projectile types. – Fixed pike phalanx single-click and double-click attack behaviour. They will now try to maintain proper distance from targeted unit instead of running into them. – Made it much harder for enemy infantry units to move/push through a pike phalanx. – Flaming projectiles are now set as default for naval artillery when available. – Increased the range of torches that can be thrown to burn down gates in battles. – Cinematic camera view in battles now works better with siege vehicles. – Disabled damage from rolling flammable projectiles that have landed on the ground (This does not include fireball deployables) – “Army Destroyed” event message now displays the name of the army instead of the name of the general. – The “Food Shortage” event message no longer contains a list of provinces affected. This can still be reviewed in the Provinces panel. – Added event message for when units defect during a civil war in Campaign modes. – Rank up event message now contains the new rank for both characters and armies in Campaign modes. – When attacking a door of a fort with a battery ram, the per cent of damage will now reach 100% when the door to opens, instead of 20%. – Fixed issue where double clicking on a map in the map list in the Battle Setup screens (in Custom Battle and Multiplayer Battle modes) would make that map always remain highlighted as if it was selected. – Fixed multiple issues surrounding certain events being fired at the same time as winning the game. – The movie player for Campaign movies will now correctly re-initialise its full screen state between queued movies. – Fixed reinforcing armies unit banners sometimes appearing darker and missing their outlines on the battlefield. – Unit banners will no longer appear black when turning on unit flags in a battle after turning them off in the campaign map. – Fixed tooltips for incident event effects in Campaign modes. – The resources icons in the Trade & Finance tab now fit in the user interface better when multiple (over 6) different types of resources are being traded. – Fixed face animations and audio not working correctly in the diplomacy screen when declare war, and prevented adding new offers/demands from interrupting the face animations. – Addressed inconsistencies in the campaign Heads Up Display when selecting between enemy and friendly settlements and characters. – Added details of the effects to “Public Order” event messages. – Fixed text clipping issues on building tooltips in Campaign modes in some languages. – Fixed text clipping on the campaign factors tooltip in some languages, now shows ellipsis to show text has been cut off. – Fixed possible cut-offs of text in the “Trait / Ancillary Gained” event message in Campaign mode. – Subtitles added to the Parthia Civil War video in Campaign modes.